BBC:

In a rare interview, President Joe Biden has said Americans are „really, really down“ as they grapple with soaring inflation after two years of a pandemic.

He told the Associated Press the „need for mental health in America has skyrocketed“.

Mr Biden said he wanted Americans to „be confident. Because I am confident.“

The president’s popularity has plunged as November elections loom that will decide which party controls Congress.

„People are really, really down,“ Mr Biden told the news agency in a half-hour interview from the Oval Office on Thursday.

„They’re really down. Their need for mental health in America has skyrocketed because people have seen everything upset.

„Everything they counted on upset. But most of it’s a consequence of, of, of what’s happening, what happened is a consequence of the, the Covid crisis.

„People lost their jobs. People are out of their jobs. And then, were they going to get back to work? Schools were closed.“

…

Last month, inflation in the US hit 8.6% – one of the highest rates in the world.

During the interview, the AP said Mr Biden became defensive when asked about this issue.

„If it’s my fault,“ he said, „why is it the case in every other major industrial country in the world that inflation is higher? You ask yourself that? I’m not being a wise guy.“

A Fox News reporter challenged the White House press secretary about this claim on Thursday, pointing out that inflation is currently lower in other top economies such as Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and India.

Guardian:

AP: So you’re talking about a country that has undergone profound psychological trauma.

BIDEN: Yes.

AP: What can you as a president do to address that psychology …

BIDEN: Be confident.

AP: … to make people feel more optimistic. Be confident?

BIDEN: Be confident. Be confident. Because I am confident. We are better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.

Now I don’t know about you dear reader, but personally I see it my duty as a patriotic American to responsibly prepare to own my bit of the second quarter of the 21^st century. And that, needless to say, is not hyperbole. That’s a fact.

Noam Chomsky:

Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.

There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence. Those are the options. Well, with near 100% unanimity, the United States and most of Europe want to pick the no-diplomacy option. It’s explicit. We have to keep going to hurt Russia.

Ω Ω Ω

The security of the population is simply not a concern for policymakers. Security for the privileged, the rich, the corporate sector, arms manufacturers, yes, but not the rest of us. This doublethink is constant, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. It’s just what Orwell described, hyper-totalitarianism in a free society.

Robert Reich:

Liz Cheney’s courage and integrity are closer to Paul Wellstone’s than to almost any current politician I can think of. All of America needs her to run for president in the Republican primaries for the 2024 election.

Die Zeit:

Der ukrainische Präsident Wolodymyr Selenskyj mit Frankreichs Staatschef Emmanuel Macron in Kiew © Ludovic Marin/​AP/​dpa

Volodymyr Zelenskiy shakes hands with Olaf Scholz next to Emmanuel Macron in Kyiv, June 16, 2022. Ludovic Marin/Pool via REUTERS

Guardian:

Report’s author says people died because US healthcare ‘leaves millions without adequate access to medical treatment’

The US could have saved more than 338,000 lives and more than $105bn in healthcare costs in the Covid-19 pandemic with a universal healthcare system, according to a study.

More than 1 million people died in the US from Covid, in part because the country’s “fragmented and inefficient healthcare system” meant uninsured or underinsured people faced financial barriers that delayed diagnosis and exacerbated transmission, the report states.

The US had the highest death rate from the virus among large wealthy countries and is also the only one among such countries without universal healthcare. It spends almost twice as much on healthcare per capita as the other wealthy countries, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data.

Guardian:

Saudi authorities seize rainbow toys in crackdown on homosexuality
Pencil cases, skirts and hats among items targeted for ‘contradicting Islamic faith and public morals’

A TV report shows commerce ministry officials removing rainbow-coloured items from shops in Riyadh. Photograph: Saudi Ministry of Commerce

Saudi officials have been seizing rainbow-coloured toys and clothing from shops in the capital as part of a crackdown on homo­sexuality, state media has reported. The kingdom opened to tourism in 2019 but, like other Gulf countries, it is frequently criticised for its human rights record, including its outlawing of homosexuality, a potential capital offence.

Items targeted in the Riyadh raids include bows, skirts, hats and pencil cases, most of them manufactured for children, according to a report broadcast on Tuesday evening by the state-run Al Ekhbariya news channel.

“We are giving a tour of the items that contradict the Islamic faith and public morals and promote homosexual colours targeting the younger generation,” an official from the commerce ministry, which is involved in the campaign, says in the report.

Winslow Wheeler, CounterPunch:

Joe Biden was a B-list Senator. One of multiple examples occurred in late 2002 when President George W. Bush was pushing America into an invasion of Iraq. Biden was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he was a non-actor in the Senate’s decision-making. Hearings he held in the Committee were inconsequential and failed to probe the speculation at the time that the case for war was fraudulent. When the legislation his committee reported to the Senate favoring war was debated there, he literally came to the chamber late, declared himself to be undecided and ultimately articulated confused reasons for supporting the invasion. No Wayne Morse or Ernest Greuning here.

Holding the vice-presidency between 2009 and 2017, the job V.P. John Nance Gardner famously described in the 1930s as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Biden can be excused for being as inconsequential as any other Vice-President. However, we see no real change in Biden as President on the war in Ukraine.

It’s not the herded lemming we saw in the debate over the Second Gulf War; instead, it is the opposite: a quick mouth positioning itself to the front of the existing parade. In January 2022, before Russia’s invasion while diplomacy was still somewhat alive, Biden publically opined that a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine might not provoke a fulsome Western reaction. His own White House fuzzed it up it as a “gaff,” but Biden’s actual wording was much more like an offer to defuse the crisis, even if it was impromptu.

Once the shooting started, Biden veered from ad hoc deal-maker to voluble cheerleader: Putin is a “war criminal;” Putin should be deposed; Putin “commits genocide.” Putin’s aggressive, multi-front invasion made any hint of deal-making very politically incorrect; the shifted winds made outraged rhetoric de rigueur. While Biden’s staff would usually try to undo the statements, they kept on coming. Biden knew exactly what he was doing: keeping himself on the leading edge of making news, allowing few others to be more visibly outraged – although some certainly tried.

This is what Senators do, not what Presidents do: issuing what amounts to press releases about the problem, getting into the news, little more; not showing the country, the allies and even the opponents a path to an end of the killing.

It seems the only strategy is to keep saying something new. Now the rhetoric is to “weaken Russia,” perhaps even break it up. It is playing the daily political game, ever more each day. This evolving rhetoric makes more extreme positions seem acceptable to the media and public and an unremarkable strategy. All this leads to a bad place.